Life has been moving along really fast the last couple of weeks. Hence, another weekly wrap-up that covers two weeks. We're also getting so much closer to vacation. We leave this coming Friday on a Mission Trip with our middle schoolers to Gulf Shores, AL. We will be doing school while there, because the following week we leave for a week long Disney Cruise. We'll be gone for two weeks total, and will even get to spend a day at the Magic Kingdom. We are all very excited, and trying to do school amidst the laundry and the packing has been hard. I spent Sunday afternoon preparing well for this week of school, so that it will not require a lot of daily planning and prep.
Now a quick recap of what we've been learning the last couple of weeks:
Dillon - In math, we wrapped up the unit on fractions. He took his test early last week, and got a perfect score. We moved on to decimals this week. We've had a great couple of weeks in math. In language arts we continued to work on adverbs, focusing on telling adjectives/adverbs apart. He also learned to diagram adverbs as well. He read the book Charlie's House by Clyde Robert Bulla, a story about a young boy from England that comes to America as an indentured slave. He finished that book early this week, and started reading Shiloh Season by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. It is the sequel to Shiloh which he read earlier this year. We also got the movie of the first Shiloh at the library and plan on watching it this week.
Dillon and I played a fraction feud game to practice comparing fractions. I got the idea here.
Abby - We've been reading the Felicity Books. We've read Felicity Learns a Lesson, Felicity's Surprise, and this week started Happy Birthday, Felicity. We've enjoyed reading these together a lot, and often end up reading 2-3 chapters in a sitting. In language arts, she's been doing lots of sentence writing. We've also continued to work on adding suffixes to root words, rhyming words, and homonyms. In math we've been doing a lot of review, review, review. We've been covering money, time, odds & evens, and liquid measurements.
She likes to use this money, which I've put magnetic tape on, when she's working on money problems.
History - We've been studying the Spanish and their impact on America. We read about the missions started by the Spanish Jesuit Priests in the book Life in a California Mission by Sally Senzell Isaacs. I wish that we would've know the historical impact of the missions when we were in California last summer, because many of them are still standing today. I would've loved to have been able to refer back to that. We did look at the path of the El Camino Real which was the road that connected the California Missions. We drove on some of that same stretch of roadway on our trip this past summer. We also read the book, Ancient Cliff Dwellers of Mesa Verde by Caroline Arnold. This was a fascinating look at the way these ancient Indians of the Southwest lived. Dillon especially enjoyed this book.
Science - In science we've learned all we ever wanted to know about pinnipeds (which means "fin-footed" mammals). This group includes seals, sea lions, and walruses. We also learned about manatees and dugongs. I learned something also, because I had never heard of a dugong. They are very similar to manatees with the main difference being where they live and the shape of their tails. Manatees live in North and South America and have rounded "beaver like" tails. Dugongs are found near the African coast, and have a more "whale like" or triangular tail. We have actually seen manatees at DIsney in the Living Seas area in Epcot. One of the manatees they have there has a damaged fin. We learned from our text that one of the biggest threats to manatees are boats, but they are not usually killed by them just injured. How neat that we've seen one of the rescued manatees at Epcot.
We've had some fun field trips/excursions over the last couple of weeks, too. Last Friday, we woke up early and got all of our school work done in a couple of hours, then we took off for the zoo. It was beautiful weather, and we even got to see the new baby Panda, Po and his mother. This week Dillon and I got to go to a Mother/Son event at our church. We got to see the Christian illusionist Harris III. We had such a fun night. Afterwards, they had popcorn, ice cream, and a fun photo booth. We enjoyed a fun evening together.
Dillon with Harris III
Life has been busy lately, but oh so fun. I hope things are going well for you in your homeschool/life as well. I'm linking up with Kris over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. If you would like to see how other homeschoolers are doing this week, head over there to find out. Thanks, Kris, for hosting this each week.
